A party can discover any nonprivileged information which is relevant to the claims or defenses of any other party. Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(1). Relevant information does not have to be admissible so long as it appears calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. Id. “Relevancy is broadly construed, and a request for discovery should be considered relevant ... to the claim or defense of any party. A request for discovery should be allowed unless it is clear that the information sought can have no possible bearing on the claim or defense of a party.” McCormick v. City of Lawrence, Kansas, 2005 WL 1606595, *5 (D. Kan. 2005) (internal citations omitted); see also Surfvivor Media, Inc. v. Survivor Productions, 406 F.3d 625, 635 (9th Cir. 2005) (“Litigants may obtain discovery regarding any matter, not privileged, that is relevant to the claim or defense of any party. Relevant information for purposes of discovery is information reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.”) (internal citations and quotation marks omitted). “The party who resists discovery has the burden to show discovery should not be allowed, and has the burden of clarifying, explaining, and supporting its objections.” Keith H. v. Long Beach Unified School District, 228 F.R.D. 652, 655-56 (C.D. Cal. 2005); see also Blankenship v. Hearst Corp., 519 F.2d 418, 429 (9th Cir. 1975) (“Under the liberal discovery principles of the Federal Rules defendants were required to carry a heavy burden of showing why discovery was denied. They did not meet this burden.”); Cable & Computer Tech., Inc. v. Lockheed Saunders, Inc., 175 F.R.D. 646, 652 (C.D. Cal. 1997) (“[T]his Court prefers to consider contention interrogatories in the same manner it would consider any interrogatory, placing the burden on the party opposing discovery rather than shifting the burden to the proponent of the contention interrogatories to justify their propoundment.”).

There is no dispute that the email attachments for the 138 emails are relevant to the claims and/or defenses in this action. (See, generally, Joint Stip. at 1-14). Defendant The Coca Cola Company (“defendant” or “TCCC”) also does not dispute that the email attachments it produced do not reference a distinguishing filename in their Concordance load file or associated TIFF images. (See, generally, Joint Stip. at 9-10 & 14-15; Defendant's Supplemental Memorandum in Opposition to Motion to Compel Production of: (1) Missing Email Attachments and (2) Valuation Documents (“Defendant's Supp. Mem.”) at 2-3). Finally, and most importantly, there is no dispute that plaintiff has no way of re-linking the missing attachments to their parent emails. (See, generally, Joint Stip. at 9-10; Defendant's Supp. Mem. at 2-3).

*2 Defendant refuses to produce the email attachments on two grounds. First, defendant claims that it has no legal obligation to re-link the emails and their attachments because it produced them in the usual course of business.[1] (See Joint Stip. at 13-14). The court is unpersuaded. The initial email that contains the attachment constitutes one responsive “document” or “document family,” i.e., a “message unit.”[2] Similarly, any responsive or forwarding email that takes some action with respect to the attachment constitutes another responsive document or message unit. As such, plaintiff must have the ability to identify which attachments belong to which emails. There is no dispute that plaintiff does not have that ability. (See, generally, Joint Stip. at 9-10; Defendant's Supp. Mem. at 2-3).

In CP Solutions PTE, Ltd. v. General Electric Company, 2006 WL 1272615 (D. Conn. 2006), plaintiff filed a motion to compel contending, among other things, that defendants produced “thousands of emails [that] were separated from their attachments[.]” Id. at *3. Defendants responded that the emails were produced in a format where plaintiff should have been able to sort the documents and determine the email/attachment relationship. Id. The court granted that motion, stating as follows:

Id. at *4(italics in original). Here, plaintiff does not have the ability to re-link the emails and, unlike CP Solutions, is seeking the attachments for only 138 emails as opposed to “thousands of emails.” Id. at *3. Further, given the Sedona Conference's view of an email and attachment as one document or message unit, it is clear that TCCC is required to provide plaintiff with either the ability to re-link the emails with the attachments or re-produce the emails with their attachments.

Second, defendant asserts that it “has no method to automatically re-link emails with their alleged ‘missing’ attachments[ ]” and that requiring it to do so would “employ a tedious manual process.” (Joint Stip. at 14-15) (bold and capitalization omitted). Again, TCCC did not provide any evidence or otherwise contend that the original emails with attachments cannot be retrieved from its server. See also supra at n. 1. Further, even assuming the email attachments were somehow not retrievable from its servers, TCCC cannot seek to preclude plaintiff from pursuing discovery based on a record-keeping system that is plainly inadequate. See Wesley v. Muhammad, 2008 WL 4386871, at *5 (S.D.N.Y. 2008) (rejecting defendants' assumption that “an institution may shield itself from discovery by utilizing a system of recordkeeping which conceals rather than discloses relevant records, or makes it unduly difficult to identify or locate them, thus rendering the production of documents an excessively burdensome and costly expenditure”) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); Nowak v. Lexington Ins. Co., 2006 WL 3613764, at *3 (S.D. Fla.), report and recommendation adopted by 2006 WL 3613762 (S.D. Fla. 2006) (defendant cannot “argue undue burden and be free from discovery obligations by retaining an outmoded filing system” that was “inadequate for the information sought ... to be gathered in any manner except manually going through each relevant file[ ]”); see also Kozlowski v. Sears Roebuck & Co., 73 F.R.D. 73, 76 (D. Mass. 1976) (“The defendant may not excuse itself from compliance with Rule 34, Fed.R.Civ.P., by utilizing a system of record-keeping which conceals rather than discloses relevant records, or makes it unduly difficult to identify or locate them, thus rendering the production of the documents an excessively burdensome and costly expedition. To allow a defendant whose business generates massive records to frustrate discovery by creating an inadequate filing system, and then claiming undue burden, would defeat the purposes of the discovery rules.”).

Finally, to the extent defendant claims that producing the email attachments would be unduly burdensome, the court is unpersuaded. It is well-established that the burden is on the objecting party to show grounds for failing to provide the requested discovery. See, e.g., Bible v. Rio Properties, Inc., 246 F.R.D. 614, 618 (C.D. Cal. 2007); Sullivan v. Prudential Ins. Co., 233 F.R.D. 573, 575 (C.D. Cal. 2005); Sherman Park Community Ass'n v. Wauwatosa Realty Co., 486 F.Supp. 838, 845 (E.D. Wis. 1980); Smith v. B & O R.R., 473 F.Supp. 572, 585 (D. Md. 1979); Laufman v. Oakley Bldg. & Loan Co., 72 F.R.D. 116, 121 (S.D. Ohio 1976). The responding party cannot simply invoke generalized objections; rather, with respect to each of the propounding party's discovery requests, the responding party

Roesberg v. Johns-Manville Corp., 85 F.R.D. 292, 296-97 (E.D. Pa. 1980) (internal citations omitted); see also Wirtz v. Capitol Air Service, Inc., 42 F.R.D. 641, 643 (D. Kan. 1967). In addition, a responding party must explain and/or establish the basis for its objection at the time it asserts its objection. See Allianz Ins. Co., 2005 WL 44534, at *2.

Here, other than stating, in a conclusory manner, that providing the email attachments for 138 emails “would be very tedious,” (Declaration of Brian A. Hightower in Support of Defendant's Opposition to Motion (“Hightower Decl.”) at ¶ 9), TCCC did not provide any evidence establishing the nature and costs of the burden and it does not appear that any declarations were submitted with the discovery responses. See Roesberg, 85 F.R.D. at 296-97. By not establishing the basis for its burdensomeness objection at the time TCCC asserted its objection, plaintiff was denied the opportunity to challenge defendant's objection. Similarly, even assuming it was proper for the TCCC to attempt to establish burden in the context of the Joint Stip., defendant's assertion that producing the email attachments “would be very tedious,” (Hightower Decl. at ¶ 9; see also Joint Stip. at 15), is conclusory and lacks substantiation. In short, defendant's generalized objection of burdensomeness is insufficient. See Kansas-Nebraska Natural Gas Co. v. Marathon Oil Co., 109 F.R.D. 12, 24 (D. Neb. 1985) (party objecting to production requests must specify why the requests are objectionable); Roesberg, 85 F.R.D. at 296-97. Finally, even if TCCC could make a showing of burdensomeness with respect to the production of the email attachments, the “fact that production of documents would be burdensome and ... would hamper the party's business operations may not be a reason for refusing to order production of relevant documents[.]”[3]7 Moore's Federal Practice, ¶ 34.14[3], at 34-87 (3d ed. 2009); see also Kozlowski, 73 F.R.D. at 76.

Under the circumstances, the court is persuaded that defendant met its burden of showing why the discovery is not relevant to plaintiff's damages claim. (See Joint Stip. at 18-20; Defendant's Supp. Mem. at 3-4); see also Blankenship, 519 F.2d at 419 (“Under the liberal discovery principles of the Federal Rules defendants were required to carry a heavy burden of showing why discovery was denied.”). Other than citing cases that set forth general damages principles under the applicable statutes, plaintiff has not set forth any cases to support the proposition that defendant's valuations of third-party juice companies—many of whom concern “other juice product lines,” (Joint Stip. at 17) (underline omitted)—are relevant to plaintiff's lost profits or defendant's increased profits as a result of the alleged misrepresentation relating to the subject juice product line. (See, generally, Joint Stip. at 16-18; Plaintiff's Supplemental Brief in Support of Motion to Compel Production of: (1) Missing Email Attachments and (2) Valuation Documents at 3-5).

*5 This Order is not intended for publication. Nor is it intended to be included or submitted to any online service such as Westlaw or Lexis.

Based on the foregoing, IT IS ORDERED THAT:

1. Plaintiff's Motion to Compel Production of: (1) Missing Email Attachments and (2) Valuation Documents (Document No. 107), is granted in part and denied in part as set forth above.

2. No later than December 9, 2009,[4] defendant shall either: (a) provide plaintiff with the information, data, or software needed to re-link the 138 emails with their attachments; or (2) produce the emails with their corresponding attachments.

3. The parties are hereby advised that, absent a stay of this Order by this court or the District Judge, they must comply with all of its provisions, i.e., the filing of a motion for review of this court's decision is not sufficient to suspend a party's obligations to comply with the court's order. See Local Rule 72-2.2 (“Regardless of whether a motion for review has been filed, the Magistrate Judge's ruling remains in effect unless the ruling is stayed or modified by the Magistrate Judge or the District Judge.”); Tinsley v. Kemp, 750 F.Supp. 1001, 1013 (W.D. Mo. 1990) (“[B]y refusing to comply with discovery merely because a motion to stay is pending, a party effectively is granting its own motion to stay—even before the court has ruled. Such a phenomenon would reduce a court's orders to useless and senseless formalities.”). A magistrate judge's decisions “should not be considered ineffective, advisory, or nonfinal simply because they may be reviewed by the district court.” Kimbrell v. ADIA, S.A., 834 F.Supp. 1313, 1317 (D. Kan. 1993). “Decisions by a magistrate judge on nondispositive motions are intended to be effective unless overturned by the district judge, just as decisions of a district judge are intended to be effective unless overturned by a circuit court.” Id.